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Prequel Problems: The Star Wars Sins and Wins of Michael A. Stackpole

Having never actually read any Star Wars novel (nor for that matter, properly ever gotten into either DC or Marvel), personally, I cannot help but feel that there is a certain richness to the whole idea of a collaborative mythos where it's just become impossible to establish any sort of chronology that can incapsulate everything ever written, or even most things written. When you get to that point where you inevitably always keep running into contradictions and everything, I feel that says that the characters and the setting have truly taken on a life of their own, just like in Greek or Norse mythology, and have become independent of editors and authors.
 
Having never actually read any Star Wars novel (nor for that matter, properly ever gotten into either DC or Marvel), personally, I cannot help but feel that there is a certain richness to the whole idea of a collaborative mythos where it's just become impossible to establish any sort of chronology that can incapsulate everything ever written, or even most things written. When you get to that point where you inevitably always keep running into contradictions and everything, I feel that says that the characters and the setting have truly taken on a life of their own, just like in Greek or Norse mythology, and have become independent of editors and authors.
That's basically what it feels like at times, so that's a good insight.
 
Good stuff! I look forward to more EU articles. (And if you’ve never read the old Lando trilogy, you really should - it’s very very eccentric.)
 
Good stuff! I look forward to more EU articles. (And if you’ve never read the old Lando trilogy, you really should - it’s very very eccentric.)
I haven't, but I should at some point. One of my upcoming articles is about an EU trilogy I never read at the time but was very impressed with on reading it now, though.
 
Having never actually read any Star Wars novel (nor for that matter, properly ever gotten into either DC or Marvel), personally, I cannot help but feel that there is a certain richness to the whole idea of a collaborative mythos where it's just become impossible to establish any sort of chronology that can incapsulate everything ever written, or even most things written. When you get to that point where you inevitably always keep running into contradictions and everything, I feel that says that the characters and the setting have truly taken on a life of their own, just like in Greek or Norse mythology, and have become independent of editors and authors.

House to Astonish is running a potted guide to Wolverine's timeline and the first ten posts were about all of the backstory he has set before his first comic.
 
Honestly I find this one baffling. Stackpole was part of the problem. The only work of his that I would put in the FixFic portion of the 90sEU would be I, Jedi. And even that was a sloppy mess only an improvement over Anderson.

Allston, Crispen, And Zahn are the people who actually detangled the mess.
 
Honestly I find this one baffling. Stackpole was part of the problem. The only work of his that I would put in the FixFic portion of the 90sEU would be I, Jedi. And even that was a sloppy mess only an improvement over Anderson.

Allston, Crispen, And Zahn are the people who actually detangled the mess.
I'm going to discuss Allston and Crispin's more successful efforts in future articles. The point here is that Stackpole was the first to try to link things together into a coherent whole, even if many of his efforts were misguided and sometimes made things worse.

I would draw a distinction between "fix fic" which to my mind is to address specific problems (of which, as you say, the only one of Stackpole's works that really qualifies is I, Jedi, which I don't even discuss much in the article) and just trying to establish links with previous publications, which is more what I'm focusing on here. Although now I realise I'm not being consistent because my Allston article will be more about him trying to fix Wolverton's stuff!
 
Also, on one point:

Kevin J. Anderson often comes in for criticism, not all of it unjustified, but one cannot help but feel sorry for him when he was reportedly told AFTER plotting much of his “Jedi Academy” trilogy that two of the planets it was set on had got smashed up in the questionable “Dark Empire” graphic novels set a year earlier – which did “the Emperor comes back as a clone in a stupid way” years before “The Rise of Skywalker” made it cool.

Back in 2007 (I believe it was), I had this one mate who found those novels about the Emperor returning in audiobook format at Malmö City Library, and so, naturally he borrowed them and listened through them. And I asked, of course, "So, how were they?", and he went, "Oh, you thought the prequels were bad? These are much, much, so much worse!" and he went on about how the Emperor not just comes back, he apparently has a space station just full of clones floating around somewhere that his "soul" can access any time he gets killed, and, for some strange reason, despite the events of The Return of the Jedi, the Emperor is able to persuade Luke to turn to the Dark Side after all, and, yeah, it all sounded very horrid.

So when they were making the sequels, I was just sitting there going, well, they better not be dumb enough to bring the Emperor back. And, well, as much as I found The Force Awakens to be rather derivative and The Last Jedi to be remarkably lacklustre, at least I could take some comfort in that, you know, they hadn't brought the Emperor back. In fact, I felt a little silly for having even felt there was a risk for that in the first place.

Of course, they would never have brought back the Emperor!

I mean, they had actually tried that once, they had "run the tests" on that storyline, so to speak, it was obvious that it didn't work, was ridiculous, just negated the rewards of the original trilogy, obviously that possibility had never been on the table!

Silly, silly me!

And then, the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker.

And that laugh.

...

It genuinely felt like he was laughing at me.
 
Also, on one point:



Back in 2007 (I believe it was), I had this one mate who found those novels about the Emperor returning in audiobook format at Malmö City Library, and so, naturally he borrowed them and listened through them. And I asked, of course, "So, how were they?", and he went, "Oh, you thought the prequels were bad? These are much, much, so much worse!" and he went on about how the Emperor not just comes back, he apparently has a space station just full of clones floating around somewhere that his "soul" can access any time he gets killed, and, for some strange reason, despite the events of The Return of the Jedi, the Emperor is able to persuade Luke to turn to the Dark Side after all, and, yeah, it all sounded very horrid.

So when they were making the sequels, I was just sitting there going, well, they better not be dumb enough to bring the Emperor back. And, well, as much as I found The Force Awakens to be rather derivative and The Last Jedi to be remarkably lacklustre, at least I could take some comfort in that, you know, they hadn't brought the Emperor back. In fact, I felt a little silly for having even felt there was a risk for that in the first place.

Of course, they would never have brought back the Emperor!

I mean, they had actually tried that once, they had "run the tests" on that storyline, so to speak, it was obvious that it didn't work, was ridiculous, just negated the rewards of the original trilogy, obviously that possibility had never been on the table!

Silly, silly me!

And then, the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker.

And that laugh.

...

It genuinely felt like he was laughing at me.
Yes.

Another point you may not be aware of: they did this other YA series later called the "Young Jedi Knights" and "Junior Jedi Knights", which was basically spinoff babies: Jedi edition, set some years after the other Bantam books. (Then, rather darkly, half the characters in them got killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong/New Jedi Order books). I've never read them because I'm not twelve but one thing that did amuse me was that a big storyline involved the Emperor supposedly having come back as the shadowy villain behind Imperial revival attempt #23, but it turned out that it was all faked with old recordings a la Moriarty in Sherlock.

So yes, even low-tier YA Star Wars stuff was sensible enough to know bringing back Palpatine is a stupid idea.
 
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